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Noam Chomsky Wants You to Wake Up From the American Dream
10 principles of oligarchy.

If you've just seen Michael Moore's movie and are wondering how in the world the United States got diverted into the slow lane to hell, go watch Noam Chomsky's movie. If you've just seen Noam Chomsky's movie and are wondering whether the human species is really worth saving, go see Michael Moore's movie. If you haven't seen either of these movies, please tell me that you haven't been watching presidential debates. As either of these movies would be glad to point out to you, that's NOT HOW YOU CHANGE ANYTHING.

"Filmed over four years, these are his last long-form documentary interviews," Chomsky's film, Requiem for the American Dream, says of him at the start, rather offensively. Why? He seems perfectly able to give interviews and apparently gave those in this film for four years. And of course he acquired the insights he conveys over many more years than that. They are not new insights to activists, but they would be like revelations from another world to a typical U.S. resident.

Chomsky explains how concentrated wealth creates concentrated power, which legislates further concentration of wealth, which then concentrates more power in a vicious cycle. He lists and elaborates on ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power -- principles that the wealthy of the United States have acted intensely on for 40 years or more.

1. Reduce Democracy. Chomsky finds this acted on by the very "founding fathers" of the United States, in the creation of the U.S. Senate, and in James Madison's statement during debate over the U.S. Constitution that the new government would need to protect the wealthy from too much democracy. Chomsky finds the same theme in Aristotle but with Aristotle proposing to reduce inequality, while Madison proposed to reduce democracy. The burst of activism and democracy in the United States in the 1960s scared the protectors of wealth and privilege, and Chomsky admits that he did not anticipate the strength of the backlash through which we have been suffering since.

Middle Eastern Wars Have ALWAYS Been About Oil

Robert Kennedy Jr. notes:

For Americans to really understand what’s going on, it’s important to review some details about this sordid but little-remembered history. During the 1950s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers — CIA Director Allen Dulles and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles — rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a neutral zone in the Cold War and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab nationalism — which Allen Dulles equated with communism — particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies that they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism [and those that possess a lot of oil]. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s director of plans, Frank Wisner, and John Foster Dulles, in September 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” according to a memo recorded by his staff secretary, Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster.

Iraq

Between 1932 and 1948, the roots for the current wars in Iraq were planted.  As Wikipedia explains:

The Mosul–Haifa oil pipeline (also known as Mediterranean pipeline) was a crude oil pipeline from the oil fields in Kirkuk, located in north Iraq, through Jordan to Haifa (now on the territory of Israel). The pipeline was operational in 1935–1948. Its length was about 942 kilometres (585 mi), with a diameter of 12 inches (300 mm) (reducing to 10 and 8 inches (250 and 200 mm) in parts), and it took about 10 days for crude oil to travel the full length of the line. The oil arriving in Haifa was distilled in the Haifa refineries, stored in tanks, and then put in tankers for shipment to Europe.

The pipeline was built by the Iraq Petroleum Company between 1932 and 1935, during which period most of the area through which the pipeline passed was under a British mandate approved by the League of Nations. The pipeline was one of two pipelines carrying oil from the Kirkuk oilfield to the Mediterranean coast. The main pipeline split at Haditha with a second line carrying oil to Tripoli, Lebanon, which was then under a French mandate. This line was built primarily to satisfy the demands of the French partner in IPC, Compagnie Française des Pétroles, for a separate line to be built across French mandated territory.

The pipeline and the Haifa refineries were considered strategically important by the British Government, and indeed provided much of the fuel needs of the British and American forces in the Mediterranean during the Second World War.

The pipeline was a target of attacks by Arab gangs during the Great Arab Revolt, and as a result one of the main objectives of a joint British-Jewish Special Night Squads commanded by Captain Orde Wingate was to protect the pipeline against such attacks. Later on, the pipeline was the target of attacks by the Irgun. [Background.]

In 1948, with the outbreak of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the official operation of the pipeline ended when the Iraqi Government refused to pump any more oil through it.

A Coherent Explanation of Obama’s Foreign Policy

Foreign policy is both economic and military. An interpretation of U.S. President Barack Obama’s foreign policy will be presented here that explains both his economic and his military decisions to-date, and that shows he’s been carrying out the policies of his predecessors in office.

On economic matters, he has turned out to be the most ambitious ‘free-trader’ of any U.S. President: he has proposed three gigantic international-trade treaties, two with North Atlantic countries (TTIP for products and TISA for services), and one with Pacific countries (TPP), not only in order to serve America’s aristocracy at the public’s expense (an international “race-to-the-bottom” in terms of workers’ wages, and race to the top in terms of stockholders’ profits and executive pay) (like NAFTA on steroids), but in order to extend the NATO military alliance against Russia, to include now these trade treaties as a companion economic alliance against Russia (to reduce Russian trade with Russia’s biggest market, which is Europe).

Obama’s economic initiative with North Atlantic countries is even more intensive than his one with Pacific countries, because his TTIP & TISA would be economic treaties that would extend the North Atlantic Treaty, or NATO, directly from the military realm into the economic realm. With his TTIP & TISA, Obama is pursuing, essentially, a NATO economic alliance to complement the military one — virtually the same members as NATO. TPP is less important, because that treaty attempts to isolate China, not Russia — and Russia is to be conquered before a conquest of China can be even seriously considered (in some future U.S. Presidency, though Obama is also ratcheting-up the military hostility against China).

Testing Out Repression in Israel

Israeli author and human rights activist Jeff Halper who has challenged the Israeli practice of destroying Palestinian homes (usually for simply building after being denied a permit) attempts to answer the question why the world continues to accept such repeated brutalities perpetrated by the Israelis against a million-plus locked-down, very poor Palestinians.

Halper detects a quid pro quo, a violent marriage of convenience in which “Israel offers its expertise in helping governments pursue their various wars against the people and, in return, they permit it to expand its settlements and control throughout the Palestinian territory.”

Halper’s latest book, War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, focuses on a “global Palestine,” and “how Israel exports its Occupation – its weaponry, its models and tactics of control and its security and surveillance systems, all developed and perfected on the Palestinians – to countries around the world engaged in asymmetrical warfare, or domestic securitization, both forms of ‘war against the people.’”

He contextualizes Israel’s globalization of Palestine “within the capitalist world system. Inherently unequal, exploitative, violent and increasingly unsustainable, Capitalism must pursue innumerable wars against the people if it is to enforce its global hegemony. These are precisely the types of wars – counterinsurgency, asymmetrical warfare, counter-terrorism, urban warfare and the overall securitization of societies, including those of the Global North – in which Israel specializes.”

The Age of Authoritarianism: Government of the Politicians, by the Military, for the Corporations

“I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country—not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society—cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.” ― Historian Howard Zinn

America is at a crossroads.

History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a militaristic state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

Certainly, this is a time when government officials operate off their own inscrutable, self-serving playbook with little in the way of checks and balances, while American citizens are subjected to all manner of indignities and violations with little hope of defending themselves.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age—the age of authoritarianism. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

World Bank Woos Western Corporations to Profit From Labor of Stranded Syrian Refugees
We should be wary of the World Bank's private enterprise solution to a humanitarian crisis.

Under the guise of humanitarian aid, the World Bank is enticing Western companies to launch “new investments” in Jordan in order to profit from the labor of standed Syrian refugees. In a country where migrant workers have faced forced servitude, torture and wage theft, there is reason to be concerned that this capital-intensive “solution” to the mounting crisis of displacement will establish sweatshops that specifically target war refugees for hyper-exploitation.

The World Bank is invoking the destruction of war in justifying its proposal. In a devastating quarterly report released last month, the World Bank described a Middle East whose economies have been ravaged by armed conflict. The financial institution put total losses due to the "war in Syria and spillovers to the neighboring five countries" near $35 billion in “output,” noting staggering levels of damage to physical objects and human beings. As a result, the world is now facing the “biggest forced displacement crisis since World War II,” the report warns, determining the immediate outlook for the region to be “cautiously pessimistic.”

Amid mounting warnings of large-scale social harm, the World Bank is pursuing its own solutions, issuing a press statement just weeks after its dire quarterly report in which it declared “support to the Middle East and North Africa will amount to U.S. $20 billion in the next five years.” While the announcement was short on details, one specific example of this help should raise profound concern.

Journalists Should Stand Up for Whistleblowers

The Obama administration’s ongoing crusade against government whistleblowers — which culminated last year in the imprisonment of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling — has reignited a debate over the role journalists should play in defending their profession and the sources and networks on which it depends.

Sterling’s serving a three-and-half-year prison term for a conviction built primarily on circumstantial evidence — a heavy sentence, though less than the draconian 24 years the government originally sought.

Sterling’s alleged crime was divulging a botched CIA operation to New York Times journalist James Risen.

While the Times and other news organizations fought for their own — hiring a team of lawyers to defend Risen against a government subpoena — they did much less to advocate for the rights of whistleblowers, or to denounce the severe punishment meted out to Sterling himself.

War, What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing.

It may be hard to believe now, but in 1970 the protest song “War,” sung by Edwin Starr, hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That was at the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement and the song, written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, became something of a sensation.  Even so many years later, who could forget its famed chorus?  “War, what is it good for?  Absolutely nothing.”  Not me.  And yet heartfelt as the song was then  —“War, it ain’t nothing but a heartbreaker.  War, it’s got one friend, that’s the undertaker…”—it has little resonance in America today.

But here’s the strange thing: in a way its authors and singer could hardly have imagined, in a way we still can’t quite absorb, that chorus has proven eerily prophetic—in fact, accurate beyond measure in the most literal possible sense.  War, what is it good for?  Absolutely nothing.  You could think of American war in the twenty-first century as an ongoing experiment in proving just that point.

Looking back on almost 15 years in which the United States has been engaged in something like permanent war in the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, one thing couldn’t be clearer: the planet’s sole superpower with a military funded and armed like none other and a “defense” budget larger than the next seven countries combined (three times as large as number two spender, China) has managed to accomplish—again, quite literally—absolutely nothing, or perhaps (if a slight rewrite of that classic song were allowed) less than nothing.

Unions and Cooperatives: How Workers Can Survive and Thrive

The year 2008 was when the big banks were bailed out, but it was also the year that catalyzed one group of window makers into democratically running their own factory.

On the former industrial hub of Goose Island in Chicago, the employees of Republic Windows and Doors made headlines after they were locked out of their jobs just before Christmas without the back pay or severance they were owed. Organized by the United Electrical Workers Union, these displaced workers did exactly what the ownership hoped they wouldn't do. They refused to quietly accept the layoffs. Instead, the workers engaged in a sitdown strike at their factory, garnering local and national media attention. Eventually, the employees won the occupation, forcing Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase (Republic's primary creditors) to create a fund to give the workers their back pay, benefits, and health insurance. This became viewed as a much-needed victory for workers and unions in a desperate economic time.

And this January, more than seven years after their initial takeover, the workers finally received their last payment won from their struggle. According to the Chicago Tribune, "The National Labor Relations Board announced Wednesday that it will distribute to 270 union workers $295,000 in back pay stemming from labor law violations."

The Rules' Alnoor Ladha on the Promises and Perils of Global Economic Activism

The Rules is a worldwide network of activists working to transform the politico-economic structure undergirding global inequality. The network, which actively supports individual social movements while operating as a think tank, advocates radical reform focused on five strategic areas: money, power, secrecy, ideas, and the commons.

Last month, I spoke over Skype to The Rules founder Alnoor Ladha. Ladha filled me in on how The Rules operates on the ground, and on his own journey from reformer to revolutionary. We also spoke about the role of the city in neoliberalism, the part the sharing economy can play in rewriting "the rules," and why Donald Trump is emblematic of the challenges faced by anti-capitalist activists.

Anna Bergren Miller: Tell me about The Rules. What is it?

Alnoor Ladha: The Rules is a network of activists, writers, researchers, journalists, coders, hackers, and artists focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty, and climate change. We don't focus on the traditional development model, which is based on aid, charity, and sympathy. We focus [instead] on the drivers of these injustices, which are things like the tax justice system, the global economic operating system—essentially the rules that ensure that the current state of pillage and destruction is the logical outcome.

Climate News

Landfill Fire Creeps Toward Buried Tons of Atomic Waste
St. Louis Residents Ask Army to stop Underground Fire from Reaching Radioactive Material

Dawn Chapman doesn’t barbeque much anymore. The mother of three is concerned about the rising levels of cancer in Bridgeton, Missouri, and the surrounding suburbs nestled together just north of St. Louis. But the source of the cancer, she says, isn’t in the meat. It’s in the air.

Bridgeton’s West Lake landfill sits atop 40,000 tons of radioactive waste, illegally dumped there nearly five decades ago. Much of the buried material was left over from experiments conducted as part of the Manhattan Project, the top secret crash project during World War II to build an atomic bomb. Now, an underground fire in a connected landfill could spread to the buried cache, which could send radioactive waste into the local air and water supply.

Or, if local EPA officials and geological experts are to be believed, maybe not. There are conflicting studies commissioned by the various parties in this saga that, maybe predictably, have produced very different results.

Since the fire began years ago, residents, activists, politicians and the landfill owners have battled over the smell coming from the underground fire and the future of the radioactive waste buried several hundred yards away.

Emissions Could Make Earth Uninhabitable

LONDON—Greenhouse gases could tip the Earth—or at least a planet like Earth, orbiting a star very like the Sun—into a runaway greenhouse effect, according to new research.

The new hothouse planet would become increasingly steamy, and then start to lose its oceans to interplanetary space. Over time, it would become completely dry, stay at a temperature at least 60°C hotter than it is now, and remain completely uninhabitable, even if greenhouse gas levels could be reduced.

Max Popp, postdoctoral researcher in climate instabilities at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Germany, has been playing with models of clouds, sunlight, carbon dioxide and oceans for a while now.

Such research could not only help with a deeper understanding of global warming and climate change as a consequence of the human combustion of fossil fuels, but also with the possible dynamics of other planets, orbiting distant stars.

The United States Has Blocked a Plan by India to Expand Solar Power and Create Local Jobs

LONDON—India has been told that it cannot go ahead as planned with its ambitious plan for a huge expansion of its renewable energy sector, because it seeks to provide work for Indian people. The case against India was brought by the US.

The ruling, by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), says India’s National Solar Mission—which would create local jobs, while bringing electricity to millions of people—must be changed because it includes a domestic content clause requiring part of the solar cells to be produced nationally.

What a difference two months make. On 12 December last year, US President Barack Obama praised the Paris Agreement on tackling climate change, just hours after it was finally concluded. “We’ve shown what’s possible when the world stands as one,” he said, adding that the agreement “represents the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got”.

Study: California Methane Leak Largest in U.S. History

The gas leak that forced the evacuation of 1,800 homes in the mountains above Los Angeles late last year was the largest methane leak in U.S. history and shows the climate risks of aging natural gas infrastructure, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

The Aliso Canyon leak near the Porter Ranch neighborhood was so big that it emitted 97,100 tons of methane — the equivalent of the annual greenhouse gas pollution from 572,000 cars, according to the study, which used aircraft to measure methane concentrations in the atmosphere near Aliso Canyon during the leak.

Though the global climate impacts of the leak were minimal, it showed that aging and degraded natural gas wells and pipelines in the U.S. could be at risk of emitting millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere, with significant implications, the study’s authors say.